


berate

by makifa



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Age Difference, Age Regression/De-Aging, Hand-wavy Science. I guess, M/M, Pining, Science Bros, Tony looks 20-something but is still iron man inside, essentially a love letter to rdj, now with art
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-08-05 17:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16371848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/makifa/pseuds/makifa
Summary: Tony places two hands on Bruce’s shoulders and Bruce feels twin electric shocks race through his body, his eyes locked with Tony’s. “I feel incredible.” His face is surely getting warm out of frustration, not because of the jarringly earnest, undivided attention Tony is giving him, and not because of the big brown eyes with the pretty eyelashes.





	berate

**Author's Note:**

> If you’d like some visual aid, Only You is on Netflix now. It’s incredibly cheesy and romantic, Marisa Tomei is adorable, and Robert speaks Italian.
> 
> e/ i also drew a picture bc i love the bots

Bruce didn’t look up from his calculations when the intercom speaker on the far wall trilled. His pen kept moving on the page, making a note about the atomic resolution of a recent test result as Tony’s voice came through.  
“Calling Dr. R. Bruce Banner to the 99th floor; repeat, Dr. Banner to the 99th floor for a low to medium grade emergency, thank you,” Tony drawled in a service industry workers monotone. Bruce waited for more, but that seemed to be the end of the transmission. By most measures, it was a fairly tame message.  
For some reason, that made Bruce more nervous than he ought to be.  
“Tell him I’ll be right there, JARVIS,” Bruce frowned, doing a cursory check of his latest work before tucking his pen back into his coat pocket, heading for the elevator.  
“He’s done something dangerous, hasn’t he?” the physicist murmured on the short way up, squeezing his fists at his sides.  
“While that is most often the case, Doctor,” JARVIS said after an awkward pause (how does a robot make an awkward pause?), “the situation at hand does not seem to be Sir’s doing.”  
Bruce’s brow furrowed. “Situation?”  
The Avengers Tower elevators were nothing if not efficient. The doors opened before JARVIS could answer and Bruce flew out to check on his Science Bro. “Tony?”  
“Ah, you made it, big guy. In record time, might I add,” he heard from somewhere in the far side of the lab, amidst the whirring and hissing of machinery that meant Tony was tinkering. “Spry, aren’t we, today?” he said like he was laughing at his own private joke. So, normal, if a little―light, is the only way Bruce can put it. Chipper.  
“Are you alright, Tony? JARVIS said there was a situation,” Bruce said, dodging around stray carts and equipment to meet the engineer. He could see his figure crouched behind one of the robots, DUM-E; more accurately, a tuft of dark hair sticking out from behind the robot’s base frame. Before Bruce got within ten feet, he was intercepted by U, who had taken a liking to him and tended to yearn for a little attention when one of his brothers were being worked on.

  
“J likes to worry,” Tony scoffed, and now that Bruce was closer the feeling that something was off grew stronger. “He’s trying to get you in on it, too. Meddlesome bucket of code.”  
“So there is no situation?” Bruce asked carefully, patting U’s claw head absently.  
“Well…” Bruce’s heart dropped into his stomach. Fuck Tony and his dramatic tendencies. DUM-E’s maintenance panel swung shut and Tony rolled out from behind the robot on a castored chair, and Bruce felt the wind knocked out of him. The familiar stranger grimaced innocently. “There’s a little bit of a situation.”  
Bruce couldn’t help but gape. In mannerisms, the man couldn’t be anyone but Tony Stark; his leg bouncing, fingers dancing in an idle motion, eyes bright, soft pout on his lips. But his lips were too clean, his trademark beard gone, along with lines of age. His jaw was smooth, the lines of his neck probably the same under the patches of motor grease. His eyes were impossibly brighter, bigger. “Tony?” The hands sticking out of his sweatshirt sleeves were different.  
The man had, at some point, maneuvered into a crouch beside DUM-E’s base under the guise of picking up a spanner but it remained there on the floor, and he made a short ordeal of arranging his arms on his knees, hissing at the robot not to look at the doctor and face the other wall, he swears to god he’ll make him a mascot costume and sell him to Chuck-E-Cheese to mop the floors, before looking up at Bruce expectantly. “Have you seen this picture?” Tony finally asked with a barely contained quirk of his lips, having given Bruce what he felt was enough time to recognize the tableau.  
“I’ve seen the picture Tony.” Bruce felt a deep sigh escape him, the other guy poking around within him as his stress levels rose.  
“It’s from that article of me at MIT―”  
“I know the one.”  
“I didn’t plan for this, obviously, but there was a sweatshirt on the sofa over there―”  
“It’s my sweatshirt.”  
“Yeah, it does smell like you.”  
The physicist had no idea what Tony thought Bruce smelled like. “You look older than sixteen,” Bruce said instead.  
Tony springs up, moving towards him. “I’d put myself at twenty-three, but when life gives you oversized sweatshirts―”  
“This isn’t possible.”  
“Well, we both know that’s not true. Now.”  
“This categorizes as a low to medium grade emergency?” Bruce demands.  
“Listen.”  
“How did this happen? Are you alright?”  
Tony places two hands on Bruce’s shoulders and Bruce feels twin electric shocks race through his body, his eyes locked with Tony’s. “I feel incredible.” His face is surely getting warm out of frustration, not because of the jarringly earnest, undivided attention Tony is giving him, not because of the big brown eyes with the pretty eyelashes.

JARVIS’ security feed showed Tony working in his welding corner, fusing a delicate piece by hand. When he lowers the mask, he’s forty-six, and when he flips it back up a half-hour later, he’s shed twenty-some-odd years.  
“Crazy, huh?”  
“How is this even possible?” Bruce wondered, willing himself not to stare at the gentle curve of Tony’s pink lips.  
“In the absence of scientific precedence, the leading hypothesis is magic,” JARVIS supplied, sounding as resigned as an artificially constructed being can be. Normally, Bruce would be impressed by a robot that can formulate its own distaste, but now wasn’t the time.  
The scientists and the AI brainstormed for as long as possible about causes and cures and applications and experiments, but the situation was just so impossible, and there was so little evidence to work with, that they came to the conclusion of waiting for Thor to return to Earth for his… otherworldly expertise.  
“But in the meantime, we’re doing a full medical examination,” Bruce insisted.  
Tony leaned back precariously in his chair, a wiry grin on his face. “I’m telling you, I feel fantastic. I could run a marathon. But I won’t. If I’d known how great my twenties would feel, I would have spent more of it sober.” He shares a look with Bruce. “Well, no, I wouldn’t.”  
Bruce wants to strangle Tony for being so blasé about the situation, but he also feels something dangerously fond for the real joy on his face. Bruce is no stranger to the aches and pains of middle age, and wouldn’t turn down a cure if he thought he’d deserved it. This is a Tony free from injury; no heart-bound shrapnel and involuntary nuclear reactors embedded into his chest, no physical evidence of torture or battle (though, of course, the worst trauma was never on his body). Bruce even envied the way Tony had vaulted over a worktable instead of walking around it purely because he could, even if he had knocked over a few instruments in the process because incredibly intelligent though he was, Tony Stark was never an athlete. Bruce wasn’t either.  
So for now―until Bruce’s tests could, god forbid, find something terribly wrong with Tony―he would keep his worry-wart mouth shut and let his friend enjoy his youth, a smile dancing on his face that absolutely did not do something to Bruce’s heart.  
“Humour me, then,” Bruce snarks, patting a patient’s chair in the medwing, onto which Tony hopped uncharacteristically obediently. Bruce turned around for just a moment to grab a tablet from its charging pad on the counter and when he turned back, he was still caught off guard again.  
Tony beamed at him in that way that he does, equal measures mischievous and eager to please. And maybe, though he wouldn’t admit this to absolutely anyone, Bruce might admit he was favouring the former if he wasn’t looking through rose-coloured glasses. He had never met Tony Stark before the helicarrier, but he was no stranger to his reputation. He remembered the article Tony mentioned earlier of his first completed artificially intelligent robot, his graduating thesis from MIT from when he was sixteen because he remembered being seventeen and absolutely smitten with the face next to the extremely advanced piece of machinery. Bruce never explored mechanics or coding himself but Tony Stark’s work was incredible for his age, and he had followed fairly seriously until the bulk of his patents evolved into confidential Stark Industries fare. He was charming on the television and handsome in his photographs, filthy rich, and a genius, a combination of things that Bruce himself could only dream of being, much less meeting. But he still dreamed. After all, as unreachable as the heir of Stark Industries had been, he was probably the only other person Bruce’s age that had a chance of being interesting and intelligent enough to understand him.  
Also, Bruce was hormonal and Stark was hot.  
Cue their twenties, when Bruce began to lose interest as Tony Stark gained international notoriety and playboy status―his own career was picking up and he had bigger things to think about. Give it a few years, and he had even bigger, greener things to think about. Since the Invasion of New York, he and Tony got along great and, though his younger self would never believe it (his current self still had trouble sometimes) he would even consider Tony a good friend.  
But turning around and seeing Tony’s youthful face, complete with sparkling eyes and floppy dark hair, brings him back to those teenage years he spent wading through engineering reference texts so he could get through that Stark kid’s stupid brilliant robot dissertation.  
Bruce himself will smash the first person to say the word crush.  
“What’s first, doc?”  
It takes everything Bruce has to roll his eyes and glance down at the tablet in his hands, though he can’t focus on any of the words. Whatever. He can do this in his sleep.  
“Well, first of all, though it seems pretty obvious, I want to test your faculties. Do you know your full name?”  
“Anthony Edward Stark.”  
And he’s sitting there on the chair wearing Bruce’s sweater which is―too much for him to think too hard about. He’s never had to deal with charming young things wearing his clothes, the fabric hanging off his frame way better than it had any business to.  
“Do you know where you are?”  
“My Tower in Manhattan. That I designed. Twice.” The sweater was loose on Bruce. It was habit, he doesn’t know, and sweaters are just more comfortable that way, and no one wants to see Bruce’s middle aged scientist body anyway, and regular Tony might wear it similarly, but this Tony was slighter still.  
“Do you know who I am? Who JARVIS is?”  
“Bruce Banner, part-time big, sexy grizzly bear,” Tony answered. “And other times, you turn green.” It’s a joke about your body hair, Bruce reminded himself. He’s not really calling you big and sexy. Ha ha. “And you’re referring to my beautiful baby AI that runs this place. Careful, Banner. If I had been mentally twenty-some-odd, I would have given a totally different answer. J was not the first J, you know.”  
Bruce hadn’t known, but he decided to file it for later and move on. “And how old are you, if not twenty-some-odd?”  
“I was forty-six a hot minute ago.”  
“You’re still forty-six, Tony,” Bruce sighed. His professionalism lasted a lot longer than a few basic questions, once upon a time. “What’s the last thing you remember?”  
“You saw the video, big guy. One minute distinguished and foxy,” (“And greasy, and actually still greasy,” Bruce interjects), “the next minute boyishly handsome. Nothing else happened. There’s nothing to remember.” He was always a difficult patient. Regular Tony was bad enough, but something about this Tony made it impossible for Bruce to get truly upset.  
“Okay, question time is over. Congratulations, you’re still you. Sleeve up, it’s blood pressure time.”  
A few tests later, Bruce carefully puts away a sample of blood and sets aside a cup for Tony to pee in later, tapping general notes of yeah, perfectly healthy I guess into the tablet, and has pulled a stethoscope from a drawer behind him.  
“Oh. Top off, I suppose,” Tony said, eyebrows lifting with the corners of his mouth. Before Bruce can even answer, he’s pulling off the sweatshirt, just barely tossing it onto a stool by the door.  
“Tony,” Bruce groans, because that’s his sweater and it almost hit the floor and he can complain about it, not because he’s overcompensating for anything like being too interested in Tony taking his top off. Because he is especially indifferent to Tony’s pale, smooth chest, he doesn’t even warn Tony about the cold when he presses the diaphragm to it, and doesn’t care one way or the other about the hiss Tony releases when he does. Bruce ignored whatever witty retort Tony had given him in favour of listening to Tony’s totally regular chest sounds. “Breathe deep,” Bruce instructed, sobered, which was maybe a strange reaction to a patient’s good health, but they lived strange, strange lives.  
They had avoided talking about it until then, but they couldn’t any longer. “Any pain?”  
“No,” Tony mumbled, wisely holding in his wisecracks.  
“Trouble breathing? Cold hands?”  
“None. Nope,” the engineer said, wrapping a hand around Bruce’s wrist as if to prove it to him, and Bruce employed every calming trick in his arsenal not to betray his shock from the touch.  
“Where did the arc reactor go?”  
Tony looked away. “I’ve… chosen not to think about that. It blipped out of JARVIS’ sensors sometime during ‘it’ happened.”  
With Tony’s permission, which didn’t come lightly, and Bruce treated with all seriousness, he performed a quick examination of Tony’s chest, feeling for anything out of the ordinary. (“Ironic,” Tony had commented.)  
Eventually, Bruce couldn’t think of any more tests, and was losing drive with every positive result.  
“I guess you’re just… twenty-three now,” Bruce said, putting down the tablet. “Happy birthday.”  
“Thanks,” Tony grinned, stretching languidly and not enticingly at all. “Pass me the sweater?”  
Bruce just barely recalled the discarded sweatshirt and, without another thought, went to pick it up and hand it to Tony. Sharing clothes wasn’t all that strange for them. Bruce regularly burned through his wardrobe and Tony was a billionaire and they were similar builds. There had to be another time Tony wore something of his, and he just couldn’t remember it―why would he? It’s a perfectly benign, normal thing for friends to do.  
Bruce pretended not to notice Tony discreetly pressing his face into the sweatshirt before pulling it over his head, because that would mean he had been watching him pull it over his head, and that was stupid. Dumb concept.  
“So,” Tony said, hair mussed from pulling on the sweater, and he had the gall to not even look bad. “That was a stethoscope. Like, a real one.”  
Bruce stared at him. “Yeah.”  
“Pretty low-tech. Surprised we even stock those in here.”  
“I stocked the medbays.”  
“Right, right, yeah,” Tony mused. “The thing is, a few of those tests―J, what’s the good doctor’s blood pressure right now?”  
“140/85. Perhaps high for the average human, but typical for Dr. Banner.”  
“Thanks, J. Yeah, some of those tests don’t really need the up-close and personal, B.”  
Bruce refused to blush. He responded with annoyance instead. “I keep telling you all that I’m not that kind of doctor. Sorry that my years of learning-on-the-job field experience isn’t up to standard.”  
“Coulda asked JARV,” Tony smirked infuriatingly, “But that’s okay. I get it.”  
“Do you?” Bruce deadpanned.  
“Yeah,” Tony said, sliding off the chair and taking a step towards the other man. “It’s the skin, isn’t it? So soft. Supple. Should have listened to Pep about those facials, all those years.”  
“Should have listened to Pepper about a lot of things,” Bruce said, a smile twitching at his mouth.  
“You’re not wrong,” Tony chuckled. “But, anyhoo. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you checking out the goods, Banner.”  
“You’re crazy, Stark,” Bruce laughed, realizing he was looking a little downwards into Tony’s eyes, now.  
“JARV, what’s Brucey’s heart beat like right now?”  
“JARVIS,” Bruce pleaded quickly, but in the end, Tony obviously held superiority.  
“Exceedingly fast, even for him, Sir. Apologies, Doctor.”  
“Like the new paint job, big guy?” Tony smirked, coming unsettlingly close, which was really just like him. “I’m a hell of a lot cuter like this, eh?”  
Tony was torturing him, taking teasing to a whole new circle of hell. That was the only conclusion Bruce could come to. If it were anyone else, it would absolutely not be working, but this was Tony. “Sure. Enjoy your vigor, Tone, but I’m kind of exhausted. See you tomorrow,” Bruce said, making to turn to the elevator, but Tony grabbed his arm before he could. He pulled him into his body, resting his hands on his waist.  
“You’re being ridiculous, Tony,” the physicist gasped, his face maddeningly warm.  
“Tell me you don’t want this, Bruce, I’ll stop.”  
The most frustrating thing was that Bruce couldn’t honestly say that. He wanted this, and he has for an achingly long time. This entire situation was ridiculous.  
Tony inched closer until he eventually closed the space between them, taking Bruce in a kiss that, too quickly, became searing. Bruce found himself reciprocating, and enthusiastically; he opened his mouth just enough for Tony to sneak his way in, and he returned the favour with his tongue, with his hands curling in that floppy hair of his, squeezing himself around Tony a little tighter. It felt like ages before they finally broke apart.  
“Fuck yeah, Banner!” Tony grinned, looking all too pleased.  
Tony’s young face struck Bruce again. “Shit,” he sighed, leaning back against the patient’s chair, “I feel like―like I’m taking advantage of you. This is so wrong.”  
Tony apparently couldn’t hold in his snort, but he looked appropriately sorry for it right after. “Christ. I’m horny, Bruce, not incapacitated.”  
“Horny, Tony? This is just―you’re, what, hormonal, Tony?”  
“Yeah, sure. Maybe, yeah. I am just revving to go, know what I mean? Hey, I’m discovering my body!” he defended after Bruce gave him a hard stare. “But―no, wait, don’t go,” he said quickly, pulling Bruce back before he could make a run for the door again. “Listen.”  
“I’ll see you tomorrow. Or the next day. Whenever both of us have our heads clear about this.”  
“No no no, that’s the thing! Yeah, my hot young bod is ready for anything but my head, my head is clear.”  
“It’s clear.”  
“Crystal!” Tony insists, rubbing what he hopes are soothing circles into Bruce’s hands. “Me wanting to jump your bones, Bruce, that’s not new. Very not new.”  
“What?” Bruce is sure his mouth is hanging open, right now, in his shock.  
“No, absolutely. You’re like a, a fertile tree for me to grow on. Like a fungus. God, I hated that as soon as it came out of my mouth. The point is, Bruce, I like you, liked you when I was old and full of bullet holes and I didn’t have the cajones to say it until I was prettier and they descended a second time.”  
Crude, even for Tony. Bruce couldn’t help but laugh. “‘Old and full of bullet holes’. I’m older than you,” he finally said, relaxing into Tony’s grip.  
“You got that right, Mister,” Tony pouted, eyes blowing wide, lacing his hands behind Bruce’s neck.  
“Ugh! God, Tony, fuck off,” Bruce coughed, feeling a shiver run down his back.  
“Right, sorry, take it back. Lemme try again,” Tony grinned, before leaning in again and kissing Bruce, who this time was a lot more receptive to it.  
The two lost more than a bit of time to each other.  
“But we can get to some doctor-patient medkink tonight, right?”  
“Tony,” Bruce groaned, pinching his side.  
“Yowch! Do it again, Professor Banner!”  
Bruce laughed loudly into Tony’s neck, and decided to deliver punishment in the form of dark marks along his throat.  
“That’s indecent!” Tony accused, feigning scandalized.  
“I’ve got a turtleneck you can borrow,” Bruce grins.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm hopeless at plot and writing conclusions. Tony's fine and Thor helps him be old again and he and Bruce keep fuckin. If I add another chapter it'll probably just be porn lmao. Make good choices! :^)


End file.
